


to the core, i'm a carnivore / i will never be earthbound

by drusillaes



Series: i've nothing left to hide from you; i've got no god to sell [3]
Category: American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Aftermath of Murder, Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Apocalypse, Bad Future, Cannibalism, Depression, F/M, Identity Issues, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Villain Wins, i couldn't fit zadison into this one i'm sorry, pretty people doing terrible things, ur local jew plays with christlike imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-14 22:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21023564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drusillaes/pseuds/drusillaes
Summary: Thirteen years ago, Mallory and Michael deal with their new shared living situation.(this is the third part to 'cause you and i know this is heaven', which was originally gonna be a trilogy but jokes on you because now I have plans for several installments)





	to the core, i'm a carnivore / i will never be earthbound

_thirteen years ago_

He kills the first person she tries to shelter in Outpost 3, not because the man was infected and driven mad with radiation (which was true) or because he tried to kill Mallory as soon as her back was turned, but singularly because of the way Mallory looks at Michael when he snaps the man’s neck. She looks up at him, less like the wisp of the witch that had so thoroughly eluded him and more like the rising Supreme she should have been, brown eyes glowing with a righteous sort of fury Dinah Stevens hadn’t managed to take, and she stalks right up to him until they’re breathing the same air. Her head doesn’t even come up to his chin, but there’s steel in her eyes. “How dare you,” she snarls, and Michael doesn’t try to hide his smile.  
“That’s an interesting way to say thank you for saving your life,” he observes, callous as ever. Mallory looks like she wants to punch him in the throat. “You didn’t have to kill him.”  
“And you didn’t have to let him in, but here we are.”

Her fists clench and unclench, but she doesn’t attack. He’s disappointed. Instead, she turns on a heel and stalks off, her hair limp and flat against worn polyester, her gray uniform soaked with drying blood and pus.

He hunts her down again —she’s sleeping in her cramped servants’ room, as she always does. It must have been almost lively before he came, with all the Gray girls bunking together. Mallory’s bunk is furthest against a wall, where a square window is drawn in thick black Sharpie. There’s a crude rendering of a child’s sun, and a few sheep standing on a hill, drawn like puffy clouds with sticks for legs. Michael had laughed when he’d first seen it, his first night at the outpost.He’d laughed at the stupid hope of the drawing, and he’d laughed at the mousy little girl sleeping beside it.

Little did he know.

“Morning, Mallory,” he says. Her back is to him but he knows she’s awake. She still hasn’t taken her uniform off, and the various fluids that seep from it stain her threadbare mattress. His mouth twists in ironic distaste. “I _do _have other clothes for you, you know.”

“Go away,” she replies, her tone lifeless and dull, and he can’t have that. Michael takes a seat on the mattress, runs a ringed hand through Mallory’s limp hair and relishes her shiver.

“You should bathe,” he murmurs. “It’s been three days, love.”

“Let me guess, you want to watch while I do it?” Her snark is unexpected, but he supposes total defeat can bring out hidden aspects of people.

He resists the urge to press a kiss to that perfect jawline. “You have no _idea_ what I want,” he mutters, instead.

There’s a tense silence, and then she clambers off the mattress with a sense of grace that’s uniquely Mallory, simultaneously stumbling on the ripped and dragging hem of that damnable uniform.

She almost uses the bleak showers of the gray dormitory, but at the last minute she decides _fuck it_, because she’s not just Coco’s subservient mouse of a girl without a personality, she’s also _Mallory_, Cordelia’s protege, the girl who had time itself in the palm of her hand. The two personalities clash inside of her like jagged glass trying to fit itself back together. Mallory doesn’t know if she’s ever going to be able to fundamentally _unshatter_ her sense of identities (_and it was all for nothing, anyway)_ but it seems like she’ll have eternity to figure it out.

So she runs herself a bath in the room attached to Wilhelmina Venable’s suite. She tries to step over Venable’s body, but the hem of her dress catches on the woman’s face, and Mallory ends up stumbling into a dresser. There’s a bruise forming on her forehead, and even as Mallory instinctively wills her magic to _heal_, she knows it won’t do a goddamn thing.

Finally sinking into the steaming water is a relief, and Mallory scrubs crusted blood off her arms, unable to forget the faces of the people it had belonged to. Every time she closes her eyes she sees Cordelia dropping to the floor like a stone, hears Coco’s neck snapping in different keys, sees the eyes of that survivor she’d invited inside, tinged with madness and desperation.

For the first time in three days, Mallory starts to sob.

Michael is up the stairs two at a time when he hears the crash —_don’t tell me the stupid cunt tried to kill herself already—_but he composes himself before he opens the door to Venable’s rooms. Mallory’s uniform is discarded on the floor near the secretary’s body, and the door to the ensuite bathroom is closed. Michael is about to knock when he hears crying. Heartwrenching sobs leak through the wooden door as Mallory screams her way through her grief. Michael’s insides twist unpleasantly, as he finds her sorrow simultaneously disturbing and arousing.

He leaves the room without knocking and kicks Venable’s body viciously, wishes he hadn’t destroyed her soul so he could revive her and kill her again. He needs something to bleed.

Mallory looks like a queen when she descends the stairs. She’s wearing one of Ms. Venable’s dresses, a black velvet ballgown with a plunging neckline from the very back of her closet. Her neck is unadorned except for the natural gold tint to soft skin and the extravagant collarbones under it, and the vulnerability of her throat is pronounced by the braided crown of her brown hair. She looks every bit a Eurydice two steps away from the land of the living.

That would make Michael Hades, of course, stealing her from her rightful place by her coven’s side. Mallory before the identity spell had a bachelor’s in religion and mythology, although her false memories still linger, telling her she dropped out of college in sophomore year when Coco offered her a job.

“You look beautiful,” Michael says, and Mallory feels the weight of a nonexistent crown of thorns over her skull. She snatches her arm away when he tries to take it. “Don’t touch me.”

He chuckles, but there’s something dangerous in it, and Mallory thinks again of snakes.

“Have a seat.”

She doesn’t know how he’s set up the meal -magic, she presumes -but it’s there, ripe and gleaming, and the part of Mallory that’s been eating leftovers since Michael defeated the Coven and sustenance cubes before that _yearns_. There are apples, of course there are, and _real meat_.

“This is real food,” Mallory says. “How did you -” Her hand stops above a cut of something that looks like steak. She turns her head slowly. Michael looks like a proud little boy.

“This is made of _people_, isn’t it?”

He arches an eyebrow, but she’s always been good at reading people just as he’s always been a talented liar, and Mallory thinks she sees the truth in his eyes.

“So paranoid, _Mallory_.” His tongue traces her name with a reverence she supposes is meant to be ironic. “Can’t I do something nice for you? Besides, it’s not like the planet is exactly teeming with options right now.”

Michael takes a seat at the head of the table, legs outstretched like an arrogant god. “Well?”

She wants to storm away with righteous disgust, to vomit, or _something_. But, gods damn her, she’s _hungry_. She’s no longer just the golden Mallory of Cordelia’s day, no, that idol has been melted down and sold for scraps and here’s what’s left: a little girl with feral wolf’s teeth.

Mallory sits at Michael’s left. “Who—who was this?”

He takes his time looking at her with those liquid nitrogen eyes of this. “You fear it’s your sisters.”  
“Yes.”

“Hm.” He cuts into his food and blood wells up between the vulnerable flesh and his knife. (_of fucking course he likes it rare_)

If Mallory wasn’t so tired, perhaps she’d make a scene. Throw a plate, perhaps. Slam her hands onto the table. Grab one of those silver serving knives and try to cut out his heart.

All those ideas pass, just as any fantasy does, and Mallory merely sits up straighter. “_Tell me._”

“I could tell you I carved up those witches like the cattle they were,” the Antichrist muses aloud. “I could also tell you that I burned their bodies while you were sulking, and I went hunting for fresher meat.” Michael smiles an enigmatic little half smile. “But you’re not going to believe anything I say, are you?”

Mallory stares down at her plate.

_“Eat,_ Mallory,” Michael says.

And she does.

**Author's Note:**

> Mallory studying mythology and religion is something that came about in one of my other short stories and I just sort of liked it so it stuck. Besides with all the (valid) comparisons she gets to Persephone/Christ/an angel, figures she should know a little about mythology.


End file.
